if only clockworks could speak
by The Crownless Queen
Summary: The spell hits him between the shoulder blades and Harry chokes. :: Harry, and some could-have-beens.


Quidditch League, Round 5, Puddlemere United: Beater 2: (Multi-verse Dimension) Write a story about a character meeting his/her doppelganger from another universe. Using: **9.[Song] Shatter Me by Lindsey Stirling**, **14.[Word] Sarcasm, 15.[Color] Black.**

I kinda wanted to just write an emotional thing about canon!Harry meeting a Harry who still had his family, because if I tried anything else I'd never have gotten to finish this within the 3k limit.

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**if only the clockworks could speak**

There are too many of them. They're not Death Eaters, not in name at least, but as an Auror it's Harry's job to fight them anyway, and so he does. Mostly, he even likes it — or rather, he likes the rush of adrenaline that comes with a fight, and the way he knows taking down these people means the world is a little bit safer for everyone else.

But it's not exactly safe for _him._

The spell hits him between the shoulder blades and Harry chokes.

It feels like falling, like that time in third year, when the Dementors invaded the Quidditch Pitch and he slipped off his broom, the whole world gone cold and pitch black and so, so quiet but for the screaming inside his mind.

And just like in third year, Harry wakes up suddenly in a familiar-but-not place, blinking to awareness slowly.

Only this time, it's different.

This time, he knows the face staring back at him — knows the cautious intrigue etched on every line.

He knows this face, and yet, this is utterly impossible — because the face staring back at him, slowly coming into focus as Harry finally manages to get ahold of his glasses, is _his._

**.x.**

Turns out, Harry wasn't staring at _himself_ as much as he was staring at a _version of himself._

Parallel universes are real, who knew?

(Well, Hermione, probably, and Harry's already taking mental notes for his clever friend, because he just knows that when he gets back, Hermione will want to know _everything.)_

That doesn't change how _weird_ of a feeling it is, though.

Other Harry appears to be weirded out too, but where Harry is mostly trying to wrap his head around everything — mostly that this is a real thing that's happening to him (and really, one would think he'd be used to these impossible situations by now, but apparently the universe can still surprise him) — Other Harry mostly appears intrigued.

There is a certain… childish innocence about him that Harry's mind shies away from. He doesn't remember himself ever feeling the type of giddy excitement Other Harry is projecting. It makes him look like a stranger for all that his face is Harry's, and it takes him a beat too long to realize why.

His heart squeezes painfully in his chest and his breath catches in his throat.

This Harry doesn't have a scar.

_Oh,_ Harry thinks, eyes suddenly prickling with tears he has to blink back. _Oh, this isn't fair._

"Where… Where am I?" Harry asks, looking away. He chooses to inspect the room he's in rather than keep staring at his not-self. It's easier to breathe that way, easier to stop his mind from circling back to the _what if they're alive, what if they're here_ that are buzzing behind his tongue.

Other Harry frowns. "Home?" He gestures at the walls, and Harry blinks as he takes in the red and gold banners spread over them. There's a Quidditch poster for the Holyhead Harpies plastered on the far left and Harry is suddenly, and very awkwardly reminded of Sirius's old room at Grimmauld Place.

"This is my bedroom," Other Harry continues. "I guess yours probably look a little different."

Harry chokes on a bitter laugh. "Yeah, just a little," he says, his voice soft. "I… erm, I have my own place," he chooses to say, because even though he shares Grimmauld Place with Ron and Hermione still, and Ginny when she's not on tour, it's still _his_ in a way no other place has been so far.

Other Harry pouts enviously. "That's nice. I've been thinking about moving out, but…" He shrugs, looking at Harry like he expects him to be able to relate, but…

Well, Harry can't. This is clearly a childhood bedroom, and for Other Harry to still live there, even though Harry is temporarily occupying his bed, means that he's not alone here.

Harry can't imagine ever wanting to leave a place where his parents might still be living.

He tries to smile, but it feels more like a grimace. His head is pounding still and that makes it a little hard to focus, but Harry forces himself to sit up anyway, swinging his legs off the bed.

He has no idea how long he's here for, or when he might get back to his own universe — Other Harry had said they didn't know much about what had brought him here, or inter-dimensional travel in general, but that it looked like whatever had brought him here was incomplete.

In short, Harry was still anchored back to his own universe, and it was only a matter of time before somebody or something pulled that anchor up, and him with it.

How much time has he wasted already? How much time does he have left?

Should he even try to leave this room? Does he want to know what he'll find outside of it?

(He does. Of course he does. But…

But Harry knows himself well enough to know that the only thing he'll find there is more pain, and though his heart aches to _go_ _and see,_ Harry isn't sure he wants to weather the heartbreak.

He isn't sure he can.)

But before he can figure out what to say, the door to the bedroom swings open violently, a short, black-haired girl almost hanging off the doorknob.

She's so familiar it's a punch in the guts. "There you are!" she says, grinning up at Harry. "And _you'_re awake! Finally — we'd started to wonder if you'd ever wake." She winks at him mischievously. "Between the two of us, Harry here was starting to regret lending you his bed."

"_I wasn't,"_ Other Harry hisses back at her, but the girl just laughs.

They keep bickering, but Harry doesn't hear a word of it. All he can do is stare. The girl looks like him, but not in the way Other Harry does.

She looks like him the way Ginny looks like Ron, and the words slip from his lips before Harry can know to hold them back.

"Who are you?" he asks, but he knows, he knows already, and it _hurts._

The girl freezes, confusion flashing across her green eyes. "I'm Rose?" she states, half-frowning, before she turns back to Other Harry. "Damn, Harry, I thought you said he was fine. How hard did he hit his head?" She faces Harry again, concern bleeding all over her face. "How hard did you hit your head?"

Harry's breath catches in his chest. It feels like he's trying to breathe around knives of frost. "I'm fine," he chokes out. "I just, I don't…" _know you_. He can't even finish the thought. "I'm sorry."

The way Rose practically deflates at that, drawing closer to Other Harry, who drapes an arm around her shoulders, that hurts too.

"You… don't know me." She shakes her head like she doesn't want to believe it. Like she can't believe it. "You really don't know me?"

Speechless, Harry shakes his head.

"Oh," Rose says. She looks up to Other Harry in askance, but he seems, for the first time since Harry woke up, to be at a loss.

She takes a deep, long breath then and shakes her head. "Well then… Then it's your loss, I guess." She smiles, and it trembles a little still.

Harry wants nothing more than to make her feel better — he's known her for less than five minutes and he thinks there isn't anything he wouldn't do for this girl who can't be more than a couple of years younger than he is. Is that normal?

He forces himself to smile back. "It is," he agrees, more sincere than he thinks Rose had been aiming for.

Other Harry eyes them cautiously, but when nothing happens, he withdraws his arm from around Rose's shoulders.

The absolutely offended look Rose shoots him is so full of sibling frustration that Harry can't help but let out an amused snort.

"It's nice to meet you, Rose," Harry says, a little awkward, but determined to push past it. He walks up to her and offers his hand in greeting. It makes him feel off-kilter, but it's better than nothing.

This is his _sister,_ and perhaps the only chance he'll ever get to talk to her. Magic has done so many wondrous things for him, but this…

This is truly miraculous.

Rose's eyebrows rise up her forehead as she eyes his hand, and Harry's in the process of sheepishly taking it back when she gives a loud snort and just… grabs it, using it to pull him into a hug so tight it might actually rival one of Mrs. Weasley's.

He half falls into her, but she's stronger than she looks, only just rocking back on her heels a little.

"It's nice to meet you too, Harry," she whispers against his shoulder, her tone teasing. Harry doesn't have to look at her to know that her brown eyes will be laughing at him, just like James Potter's do, sometimes, in the pictures Harry has.

He wants to, though, and so he regretfully pulls back from the hug.

Rose pouts a little as he does so, before sighing.

"Anyway," she says, addressing her brother, "I came here to tell you that Mum and Dad are back."

To Harry, she says, "They went to the Ministry. Mum works for the Unspeakables and she wanted to check some things about your situation." Other Harry shoots her a warning glare, and she rolls her eyes. "Relax, it's not like he can tell anyone. Besides, I'm pretty sure the 'no telling anyone you're an Unspeakable' rule doesn't apply to parallel universes, and he's family even if it does, so… I think we're good."

She sends Harry a commiserating glance before rounding back on her brother. "Also, you're choosing a very weird time to suddenly be all suspicious of him."

"I just didn't want to overwhelm him," Other Harry hisses back, bristling.

Rose snorts. Her next words practically drip with sarcasm. "Because I'm sure being faced with his doppelganger wasn't weird and overwhelming at all."

"I'm still here, you know," Harry says, starting to feel a little annoyed. "And it was fine," he lies.

It absolutely wasn't fine. Part of him still thought this was a hallucination, and the rest of him is so in shock he's somehow bypassed all the stages of grief and jumped straight to acceptance.

"It's not the first time this has happened," he confesses absently.

"... Waking up in another universe?" Rose asks incredulously.

Harry winces. "No, not that," he says tiredly. "The…" He waves his hands around, trying to encompass the whole situation. "Staring at a doppelganger thing. Polyjuice," he adds, when the siblings' expressions don't clear up.

And suddenly, just like that, his mind is aflame, burning with questions about this unfamiliar universe.

What is different there, apart from this unexpected sister and the parents downstairs he's still trying very hard not to think about, lest he either run there or start crying (or both)? Was there a Voldemort too? Did his counterpart simply luckily escape Harry's own fate as the Boy-Who-Lived, or are there more profound changes?

He could ask, he knows, and they'd probably answer him too. They've been pretty good at that so far — his Auror robes are, apparently, a universal constant, and enough to inspire trust where his face is not enough to.

But does he have the right to? Can he disturb their world like this, when he knows he won't get to stay?

Harry doesn't think that'd be right, and so he swallows back his questions. It has to be one of the hardest things he's ever done.

Instead, he pastes on a smile, polite as he can, and asks Rose, "You said —" _Mum and Dad _"— your parents were back?"

"They're your parents too, you know," Other Harry points out.

_Not really_, Harry almost says, biting his tongue until he tastes coppery blood. _His_ parents are two decades dead. Whoever Harry's going to meet… They won't be _his_ parents. He'll be fine, just as long as he remembers that.

He will be. Truly.

(And if his hands keep shaking as they leave the room, well… That's his business now, isn't it?)

**.x.**

It's weird, really, but Harry's first thought when he sees James and Lily Potter is _They're old._

It twists something inside his stomach, to think that, but somehow, it also makes it a little easier to breathe. Harry's parents never got to be this old — Harry's father never got to the point where his hairline started to recede, where the black hair on his temples started going just a little bit gray. Harry's mother never got to grow laughter lines, never got to the point where her whole face smiles with all the happiness of a life well lived.

It hurts, yes, but it makes it easier to keep them separated from the icons in Harry's memories, the shimmering photographs he holds close to his heart.

Harry still freezes, seeing them, like he had frozen when he'd first seen Rose. He drinks in the sight of them — the people his parents could have become — and tries to etch it into his memory.

This isn't his world, he won't get to stay for much longer — already, he thinks he can feel his hold on this reality shake, his vision blur, but…

Oh, these are simply the tears. He reaches up with a trembling hand to wipe them away — he's supposed to be _fine,_ dammit, this is a _gift,_ really, he can break down once he's back in his own world, with his own family, not _here, _not _now._

"Oh dear," somebody says, and Harry's heart rises up his throat.

That's his mother's voice, _fretting over him,_ and Harry feels faint.

A strong and warm hand catches him, and Harry finds himself looking up into warm, _fatherly_ brown eyes, and it's almost too much.

"_I'm fine,"_ he tries to tell them, but the words stick in his throat like honey.

He can see the moment this James and Lily Potter realize — of course, he doubts they can tell _everything_ that went wrong with his life, but they can tell enough.

They can tell they aren't here for him anymore, and the subsequent hug feels like…

Well, it feels like it's ripping open a wound in Harry's chest he'd forgotten was there, clearing it out and stitching it cleanly for the first time in… possibly ever.

It feels like coming home, and it won't last, Harry knows it _can't_ last, but for here, for right now?

It's enough.

No, it's _plenty._


End file.
